At first, the court barely concealed an amused smile as it listened to the old gentleman expound, with many convoluted phrasings, on the Constitutional Council, the separation of powers and the court's legal incompetence in judging the case at hand: That of the far-right Front National (FN, now Rassemblement National, RN) parliamentary assistants at the European Parliament. Bruno Gollnisch, 74, the party's former second-in-command, a professor of Japan studies and former dean of the very right-wing Lyon-III university, was questioned about his parliamentary assistant's questionable contracts. He is accused of having embezzled €1.41 million of European funds from 2005 to 2015, to provide fake MEP assistant jobs to three people who were actually working for the FN party.

A little over an hour later, on Tuesday, October 8, the presiding judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, started to show signs of impatience, but Gollnisch had no intention of giving up so soon, and dodged questions with vivacity and long reponses. After four hours, the judge asked him to sit back down. You could feel sorry for his lawyer, Nicolay Fakiroff, if he, too, hadn't asked an endless series of questions, which only resulted in further fueling the defendant's verbal train of argument, which he sprang back into at full speed.

The next day, the judge got angry. "What do you want to say that you haven't already said?" she asked.

"An enormous amount of things," replied Gollnisch, obsequiously.

"You always explain the same things," retorted de Perthuis, cutting him off and adding "we don't want generalities, [you] can't speak in the vague."

"Your honor, I'm going to be remarkably precise. A few points about the procedure of the Court of Justice of the European Union," said Gollnisch.

"That's not the question we asked you," said the judge, now frankly irritated. "We can't spend our time listening to you repeat the same things. Otherwise, we'll stop. Go and sit down for five minutes."

"If I'm interrupted all the time when I'm presenting evidence..." grumbled the old man.

Gollnisch's three former assistants had a more conventional defense, but it was not much more effective. Micheline Bruna, the private secretary of FN co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been paid by the EU Parliament to officially serve Gollnisch as a parliamentary assistant. She acknowledged that she had kept the MEPs' budget allocation accounts up to date, and that a new assistant would occasionally be slipped into the books – for a part-time contract here, a few days there – just to fully use the budget the Parliament so graciously provided.

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